As Jamila Gatlin waited in line at a northside Milwaukee elementary
school gym to cast her ballot June 5 in the proposed recall of Wisconsin
Gov. Scott Walker, she noticed three people in the back of the room.
They were watching, taking notes.

Officially called "election observers," they were white. Gatlin, and almost everyone in line, was black.

"That's pretty harassing right there, if you ask me," Gatlin said in
the hall outside the gym. "Why do we have to be watched while we vote?"

Two of the observers were from a group based more than 1,000 miles
away called True the Vote, an initiative that grew out of the Houston
Tea Party known as the King Street Patriots. Their goal is to prevent
voter fraud, which the group and founder Catherine Engelbrecht claim is
preventing "free and fair" elections.

Two months earlier, at True the Vote's second national summit in
Houston, more than 300 people from 32 states were transfixed by
Engelbrecht and an array of conservative speakers.

"You have all been chosen because you are all warriors," the
42-year-old mother of two said to cheers at Houston's Sheraton
Brookhollow hotel.

A few people wore $20 True the Vote T-shirts showing Martin Luther
King Jr.'s image over the quote, "Peace if possible, truth at all
costs." The quote is widely credited online to16th century theologian
Martin Luther, not the civil rights icon. However, Mark Edwards, senior
adviser to the dean of the Harvard Divinity School, told News21 he could
not be sure the quote was Martin Luther's.

Few minorities heard Engelbrecht say "the time has come for a
national call for election integrity," but about 100 minority protesters
were outside, protesting True the Vote and a national trend of tougher
voting regulations.

The protesters, mainly blacks and Hispanics from a coalition of
Texas-based minority rights groups, came to the Not In My Houston
protest with their mouths covered in bright blue tape and holding signs
that read, "We will not be silenced" and "Stop voter suppression!"

In just three years, True the Vote has moved beyond Texas and
established itself as one of the political right's fastest growing and
most controversial groups.

With its model of poll-watcher training and voter-roll analysis used
in at least 20 states, True the Vote is part of a national movement to
tighten regulations on early voting and voter registration and to
require that voters show ID at the polls in the name of fighting voter
fraud.

Since 2010, 37 state legislatures have passed or considered such
laws, championed by conservative activists, including True the Vote.
Critics claim these new restrictions could suppress the votes of
millions of people, especially minorities, across the country.

Engelbrecht testified in favor of the photo ID law in the Texas
Legislature in 2011. The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights
Division blocked the measure in March, claiming it could
disproportionately suppress Hispanic votes. A three-judge district court
panel in Washington heard arguments in the Texas case in July.

"For every fraudulent vote that is cast, a valid vote is
disenfranchised," Engelbrecht told News21, saying that the only way to
trust elections is to make sure "only legitimate votes are counted to
begin with."

While Engelbrecht says her group is about fighting election fraud,
Democrats and civil rights activists say True the Vote and related
organizations target black and Hispanic polling places to hold down
minority votes.

"You don't have to beat up people up or chain them to keep them from
voting," said Terry O'Rourke, an attorney in the Harris County (Texas)
Attorney's Office in response to the King Street Patriots and True the
Vote's 2010 activities.

Engelbrecht and her supporters can point to little evidence of voter
fraud prosecutions, relying on anecdotes and news reports alleging
fraud.

Still, she says True the Vote will train 1 million poll watchers
nationwide, leaving "no polling place unmanned" to stand guard against
election fraud in November.

Labor, civil rights and voting rights groups, including the AFL-CIO,
NAACP, National Council of La Raza, also are coordinating poll
watchers.

Others, including Demos and the Brennan Center for Justice at New
York University School of Law, plan to educate election officials on
what poll watchers can do.

With President Barack Obama's re-election campaign and civil rights
groups expected to mobilize their own armies of lawyers and poll
watchers, and True the Vote's efforts, thousands of poll watchers could
face off in November.

"We are concerned about groups that exaggerate claims of voter
impersonation in order to organize efforts that can lead to intimidation
of eligible voters," said Eddie Hailes, managing director at the
Advancement Project, a Washington D.C.-based civil rights group.

True the Vote was active in Wisconsin for weeks before Walker and
five Republican officials faced a labor-backed recall after the state
limited the collective bargaining rights of public employees. True the
Vote trained about 500 poll watchers, mainly through Web-based sessions,
and recruited volunteers from across the country.

A week after Walker beat back a labor challenge to keep his office —
which True the Vote called "a victory" — the group joined with
conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch to sue Indiana elections
officials over the state's alleged failure to maintain accurate voter
rolls according to federal law.

Through multiple email blasts, True the Vote urged support for
Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott's effort to remove thousands of
suspected non-citizens from the state's voter rolls. What has become
known as the "purge" faced several lawsuits that claimed Florida tried
to strip eligible voters, predominantly minorities, of the right to
vote. The group also joined Judicial Watch in a federal suit backing
Florida against the federal government.

The activities of the King Street Patriots and True the Vote have
attracted two lawsuits and a state ethics complaint in Texas since 2009.
In a lawsuit brought by the Texas Democratic Party, a judge ruled in
March that True the Vote was acting as a political action committee,
violating state campaign finance law by providing illegal contributions
to the Republican Party in the form of trained poll watchers and
Republican-only candidate forums.

Texas Democratic Party general counsel Chad Dunn said he doesn't buy the group's grassroots image.

"Nobody gets to know what they are doing. They are the one and only
political operation in Texas that isn't disclosing its donors," he told
News21.

Engelbrecht said her groups raise most of their money by passing
around an old felt cowboy hat at weekly meetings at King Street's
headquarters.

The group raised $64,687 in 2010, according to federal tax
documents, reporting it all as gifts, contributions and grants. After
initially offering to provide its 2011 tax records to News21,
Engelbrecht later declined.

Engelbrecht ran a small oil-field services company with her husband
Brian, out of public view, until 2009, when she got into politics after
hearing CNBC personality Rick Santelli's call for a Chicago tea party.

Wanting to do more direct action than other Houston-area tea party
groups, Engelbrecht formed King Street Patriots in 2009, naming it for
the Boston site of a bloody confrontation between British troops and
American colonists in 1770. True the Vote, formed next, is the
poll-watcher training and voter-roll purging effort.

Engelbrecht, who has called poll watchers the "eyes and ears of the
republic" who "preserve a free and fair process," has been working hard:
True the Vote already has hosted two national summits and drawn
thousands into its work.

She has surrounded herself with influential conservative advisers
including former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams, who
accused his agency of bias against whites for failing to pursue voter
intimidation criminal charges against the New Black Panthers in 2008.
Another adviser is the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation's
Hans von Spakovsky, one of the right's leading voter ID advocates.

Lawyer James Bopp — who successfully argued the Citizens United
case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed unlimited spending on
campaigns by corporations — is one of the attorneys representing the
King Street Patriots and True the Vote in the Texas Democratic Party
lawsuit.

Engelbrecht and True the Vote volunteers, in interviews at the
group's summit in April 2012 in Houston and in Wisconsin, describe
themselves as the front line in a war against voter fraud.

Engelbrecht's poll watchers claimed to witness election workers
telling voters how to vote in Houston in 2010, and submitted 800 reports
of irregularities to the Harris County Clerk's office in Houston.
Nothing came of the complaints.

"Just being in the poll and having a presence in the polling place
is a deterrent," said Cathy Kelleher, a Maryland real estate agent who
started poll watching and voter-roll inspection efforts after getting
involved with True the Vote in 2011. "We're there so people don't try to
do anything fishy."

Kelleher also takes part in True the Vote's other initiative, which
allows volunteers to scour voter registration records for
irregularities. True the Vote provides volunteers with a database to
compare voter rolls with other public records, and any potential
problems are forwarded to local election officials for investigation.

True the Vote won't discuss the quality of its database, and volunteers have to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Kelleher said she's used the database extensively in Maryland with
her group, Election Integrity Maryland. In a little more than a year,
she claims to have found thousands of cases of people who've left the
state but still are on voter rolls, and dead people listed as active
voters.

"We've made no assertions thus far that voter fraud has been
committed," Kelleher told News21. "All we're saying is that there has
been nothing done to prevent it."

Alisha Alexander, the elections director in Prince George's County,
Maryland, said Kelleher could be helpful if she understood legal
requirements for removing people from voter rolls.

"I'm not sure that this group does understand the state law,"
Alexander said. "Because a group comes out and says these individuals
(should be off the rolls) based on research from Facebook and LinkedIn,
that's just not an acceptable source."

Kelleher said some of her volunteers have used social media, but
only after using other public records and websites such as
whitepages.com, veromi.net and peoplefinders.com.

"Certainly, based on (Facebook and LinkedIn), we don't expect
someone to be taken off the voter rolls," Kelleher said. "But we do
expect the Board of Elections to do more than they're doing now."

Texas Democrats accused Engelbrecht's poll watchers of intimidating
minority voters during the 2010 election in Harris County. The county
attorney's office and the U.S. Department of Justice looked into the
allegations,but no charges were brought, according to O'Rourke and
Douglas Ray, another attorney in the office.

The U.S. Department of Justice won't discuss specifics but a
department official told News21 that federal monitors were present
during the 2010 election and the May 2012 Texas presidential primary.

Engelbrecht, who said True the Vote has not harassed or intimidated
anyone, insists it is nonpartisan and does not target minority voting
areas.

"When you look at where there is need for people to go and work at
the polls," she told News21 in a phone interview, "the fact of the
matter is, there are fewer volunteers working in minority locations."

True the Vote claims its volunteers are diverse. However Engelbrecht
denied News21 requests for a demographic breakdown of her volunteers.

Voting rights groups say white poll watchers in minority areas can
have a disenfranchising impact even if there's no direct interaction.

"In a community where voter participation is not very high and where
folks are not as politically active, any barrier that prevents you from
getting to the polls or that discourages you from getting to the polls
is potentially a problem," said Nic Riley of NYU's Brennan Center.

Chandler Davidson, a professor for nearly 40 years at Houston's Rice
University and an expert on minority voting rights in Texas, sees the
King Street Patriots and True the Vote's activities in a historical
context.

"We have a long and sad history of efforts by the white majority in
the state of Texas to prevent or cut down on the ability of minorities
to vote and to elect candidates of their choice," Davidson told News21.

If it isn't racism, Davidson said, the goal is to suppress Democratic votes.

Ray, of the Harris County Attorney's Office, has talked with the
King Street Patriots about rules governing poll watchers, and has heard
complaints about them from the community. He said there's no problem if
Engelbrecht and her groups follow the law and respect people's right to
vote.

But, Ray said, the way True the Vote goes about its mission creates tension.

"The problem is not the actual act, but what the act is
representing," Ray said, citing that the group's advisers, speakers at
its summits and language on its website.

"If you listen to all their rhetoric, it's clear what their intent
is," Ray said. "Their intent is to try to act out on this belief ...
they have that the only reason Barack Obama got elected is because a
bunch of 'those' people cheated on their ballot."

Echoing the reaction to True the Vote at the northside Milwaukee
polling place and the Houston protest, Ray said, "If you have people
standing around and falsely accusing you of doing things that are
innocent, then you quickly come to the conclusion that there's one
reason that they're doing that. I mean why aren't they going to (a white
part of town) and doing the same thing over there?"

AJ Vicens and Natasha Khan were Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellows this summer at News21.

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True the Vote grew out of the Houston Tea Party, also known as the King Street Patriots. The organization sold $20 T-shirts with images of Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr., promoting the group's mission of 'free and fair' elections during a national summit in Houston in April.

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